by Mo Farah
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she hissed. ‘You can’t just bring strangers around here! Tell him to leave at once!’
‘But Hooyo [Mum]!’ I protested, ‘he’s my friend!’
There was still so much I had to get used to when it came to life in Britain. Like the weather, for example. I’d never seen snow before. That first winter it snowed so heavily I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The whole town was blanketed in thick white. Then there was the cold. Djibouti stayed hot all year round. In December and January the temperature might drop to around 29ºC. That’s about as cold as it ever got. My first winter in England, I remember my fingers and toes turning numb from the freezing cold. I wore gloves but I could never warm up my hands. I’m fine with the rain, but I can’t be dealing with the cold. I’ll probably never get used to it.
My time at Oriel came to an end in the summer. I’d finished Year Six and would now be going to secondary school. At home, my parents decided to separate.
My dad coming home from Djibouti without Hassan had a big influence on the breakdown of their marriage, I think. It cast a shadow over the family. Eventually, Mum and Dad decided to get divorced. As kids, we all had a choice with regards to whom we wanted to live with. My three brothers chose to move to Brighton with my dad. For me, things were different. I had already grown close to my cousin, Mahad. I still missed Hassan every day – he was a big void in my life – and in a way Mahad was the closest thing I had to Hassan. It was Hassan all over again. We did everything together and I looked up to him. I’d been so used to having a wingman to do everything with, and having grown close to Mahad, I didn’t want to go through that trauma again of being separated from someone I’d bonded closely with. I wanted to stay with Aunt Kinsi so I could be close to Mahad. Out of sympathy for my situation, and knowing what I had already been through with Hassan, my parents agreed. Aunt Kinsi had been good to me. This was also good for me because my mum remained local – she lived just up the road from my auntie, which meant I was able to see her regularly. I shared a bedroom with Mahad at Aunt Kinsi’s. We had a bunk bed. I got the top bunk; Mahad slept at the bottom.
Several years later – I’m not sure of the exact date – Mum flew back to Djibouti to search for Hassan. She’d missed him as much as me and was desperate to find out what had happened to her son. She flew back with a view to spending as much time as possible looking for Hassan, doing whatever it took to find him. Mum went round all the villages, asking everybody – family, friends, neighbours – if they knew Hassan’s whereabouts. Finding someone isn’t easy in that part of the world. You can’t just pick up the phone and ring around or look someone up in the telephone directory. You have to physically travel from village to village, knocking on door after door, asking this person and that person. Mum walked miles upon miles in the sweltering heat. She had to ask scores of people before she finally got an answer and discovered what had happened to Hassan. It turned out that the extended family he’d been living with in Djibouti while he’d been ill had returned to Somaliland before my dad returned. Mum was reunited with Hassan not long after. But it would take another nine years before I saw my brother again.
In September 1994 I started secondary school at Feltham Community College. The school was based on Browells Lane, a leafy street just off the busy Uxbridge Road, and only a short walk from my aunt’s place. However, I ended up starting two weeks later than the other kids. Towards the end of my time at Oriel the Year Six kids were invited to the college for an open day – a chance to have a look around the classrooms and meet the teachers in preparation for the autumn. After being dragged around the school grounds all day long, me and a few mates decided to play a game of football on the school fields. During the game I jumped for a header and landed awkwardly on my side. Instantly I felt this sharp pain ringing in my shoulder joint. I could hardly stand up. The shoulder began to swell up. I remember someone from the school calling an ambulance. I was taken to the West Middlesex A&E department, where the doctors did some scans and told me I’d broken my collarbone. They wrapped my arm in a protective sling and ordered me to rest for three weeks. I missed the start of term because of that injury.
As a young kid in Africa, fear gets beaten out of you pretty quickly. Some of the scrapes and trouble I got into at Feltham were purely down to the fact that I don’t have any fear. I remember heading down to the local swimming pool with Mahad and another friend one day. I was a bit naïve at the time and I didn’t realize that you actually needed lessons in order to be able to swim. So while Mahad did the sensible thing and got into the baby pool, I jumped into the deep end of the adult pool after our other friend, who was a confident swimmer – and promptly sank to the bottom like a stone. Then I started panicking. I thought I was drowning. My arms and legs were flailing as I frantically tried to reach the surface. In my sheer panic I began scratching my friend’s arms and legs. Half the people in the pool emptied out.
I suppose the school might have been a little nervous about me starting there. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently there had been another Somali kid at the school a couple of years before I enrolled there. He was also called Mohamed Farah. Apparently he was a handful – even more so than me! After six weeks, this other Mohamed Farah left the school. No doubt a few of the teachers saw the name ‘Farah, Mo’ on the register, heard that I’d missed the start of term with a busted collarbone and probably thought, ‘Oh, no – here comes another one.’
My biggest struggle in those days was with my English. I could speak a few words but I couldn’t read or write, and sometimes I had to communicate with people using hand gestures because I didn’t know the word for certain things. To help improve my English, the school placed me in an English as an Additional Language (EAL) group. I still struggled. In a way, I wished I’d had a year or two of just studying English. I would’ve been better prepared for life at Feltham then. Instead, I found myself sitting in this EAL class and finding it difficult to concentrate. There was a Ukrainian kid in the group called Sergiy. We used to fight all the time. It was like Frazier–Ali between Sergiy and me. I learnt more about fighting than I did about English in that class.
I got into a fair few fights in my early days at Feltham. It was never anything serious, just the odd scrap here and there. Because I usually have a smile on my face and try to be nice to people, my kindness often gets mistaken for weakness. I suppose I stood out at school. I was slightly different from the rest of the kids. I came from another continent, I was a Muslim, I spoke another language. Some kids probably looked at me and thought, ‘Yeah, here’s someone we can push around.’ They didn’t know me. I’ve never been afraid to stick up for myself. I’d had a tough childhood – tougher than a lot of kids. From a young age I had to learn to be a fighter. I never backed down from a fight.
There were isolated incidents of racism. Feltham, as a school and a general area, was predominantly white, and black kids were in a minority. I remember one time, me and Mahad were heading down to the local youth club in Hanworth. The club was 300 metres up the street from our house and backed onto Hanworth Park, where travellers would regularly camp throughout the year. We’d head down there after school to play football and muck about. On this one afternoon, a load of kids from the travellers’ camp decided to make their way down to the club. Me and Mahad saw them hanging about there. Suddenly, for no reason at all, one of the traveller kids reached out and grabbed hold of me. He was much bigger than me and the other kids at the club looked on in silence.
‘You wouldn’t mind if I hit this one, would ya?’ said the kid who’d grabbed me, nodding to the others.
No one said a word. The kid punched me in the face. His mates were there too. I tried fighting back. But there was loads of them.
‘Leave him alone!’ Mahad shouted. ‘He hasn’t done anything.’
In a flash several of the other travellers rounded on Mahad. They began laying into him too. It was two of us against about ten of the travellers. We wer
e helpless to fight back. We couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t even leg it home because we didn’t want the traveller kids finding out where we lived, given that we were just up the road. To this day I’m convinced they picked on Mahad and me because of the colour of our skin. There were plenty of other white kids around the club that afternoon but the traveller kids didn’t start on any of them. Mahad and me were the only ones they targeted.
I recall another incident which happened later on, when I was fifteen years of age. I was hanging around the local arcade with Mahad when another kid from school began dishing out racist remarks at me. We squared up and for a brief moment it looked as if it was going to get physical. Sensing that trouble was brewing, I pulled a pool cue from the nearby table and cracked this kid over the head with it. Me and Mahad quickly legged it out of the arcade. Sometimes I couldn’t avoid getting into trouble, just because of the colour of my skin. But I wasn’t afraid. I could handle myself.
In the classroom I was disruptive. My poor English meant that often I couldn’t understand what the teachers were saying and I couldn’t read from the textbooks. I quickly grew bored in class. To pass the time I’d make noises at the teachers when their backs were turned. I did a good lion impression. My deer noises were scarily realistic. The other kids in class would be in hysterics. Then the teacher would spin around and demand to know who was making the noises. No one could prove a thing, but I’m sure the teachers knew who was responsible.
Part of the problem for me was that I was dyslexic. But I was also restless and had a lot of energy, and I needed some kind of outlet. Put simply, I couldn’t keep my hands still. I’d take apart anything that was to hand. To this day, I’m forever fiddling with things, unable to sit quietly. Tania says that she dreads it when I’m out of competition, those rare weeks when I have no training. I’m not the type who likes to sit around, and for pretty much the entire week I’ll be fidgeting, searching for something to do. Often I’ll try to get reactions out of people. I’ll do this thing where I’ll flick the tip of my wife or oldest daughter’s ears, just because. Or I’ll tease them. Practical jokes are a way of burning off all this energy that I’ve got. By the end of my break from training, I’ll have gotten on Tania’s nerves so much with my continual silliness that she’ll be counting down the minutes until I’m due to tie up my laces and get back on the running track.
My lack of English led to more problems in the classroom. One day I received a letter from my geography teacher at the end of class. The letter was addressed to Aunt Kinsi. My teacher told me not to read the letter, but to take it home. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have read it. I raced home after school, beaming from ear to ear, convinced that the teacher had given me some sort of certificate. I bolted through the front door, proudly waving my ‘certificate’ in front of my aunt. I handed her the letter. As she read it, her face changed. Her expression suddenly went severe.
‘This isn’t a certificate. This is a letter warning about your behaviour.’
It wasn’t the last such letter Aunt Kinsi received. Sometimes it was my fault. Other times, my friends were just as culpable. They’d teach me swear words, pretending they meant something else, something innocuous. The next class, I’d try out my new words on the teacher. They’d look at me in horror and, as if on cue, the other kids would fall about laughing. Only then would I realize what I’d done. Result, another trip to the head teacher’s office. Other times, I’d bunk off school. Things continued like this for a while. The fights, the animal noises, the detentions. Being dragged into the head teacher’s office to be given yet another warning. It’s fair to say I was a bit of a wild child. It’s also fair to say that if I had continued on that same path right through school, I wouldn’t have ended up in a good place.
A lot of the time I was frustrated because I couldn’t properly express myself. I didn’t have the ability or confidence when it came to speaking English. In Djibouti I’d picked up a bit of French, the national language, from lessons at the madrash and from talking to people in the streets. English I found much more difficult to master. I think this is because I was trying to learn it at an older age. At four, learning a new language is easy. At ten or eleven, it’s much trickier. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get extra support from the school because technically I had a linguistic problem, not a learning one. My learning skills – my ability to understand things – were fine. I just couldn’t understand the question to begin with. That’s what caused me problems. In fact, the only two subjects I enjoyed at Feltham were maths and PE. And if it hadn’t been for PE, then I might well have ended up being permanently excluded from Feltham.
PE class was twice a week, in the afternoons. I was forced to sit out the first few classes because of the sling I was wearing to help heal my broken collarbone. Once my injury healed, I was able to join in with the other kids. The athletics season was in full swing. The first lesson I took part in, Alan Watkinson, the PE teacher, gathered us around in two separate groups to teach us how to correctly handle and throw a javelin. As he spoke to the other group, I spotted a football goal on the field next to where we were sat with orders to be on our best behaviour, for obvious safety reasons. Great, I thought. I used to love swinging from the goalposts. Whenever I saw a football goal, I just had to swing from it. Couldn’t resist it. So off I went. While Alan lectured the other group, I started swinging back and forth from this crossbar.
Suddenly Alan looked up and spotted me. A look of horror crossed his face.
Alan Watkinson was a young teacher at Feltham. He was outgoing, friendly and bursting at the seams with enthusiasm. He even had hair in those days. At the time I joined Feltham, Alan and the head of PE for the school, Graham Potter, were in the process of creating something special. The school was building a reputation as one of the best in the area for athletics and had won several borough athletic championships. A lot of that came down to the hard work put in by Alan and Graham. I was fortunate to be at a school where the PE department was continually on the lookout for young athletic talent, and where the teachers wanted to nurture that talent. For me, it was definitely a case of right time, right place.
Football was my passion. Athletics was fun, but for me, football was where it was at. My life was football, football, football. As soon as my collarbone had healed up I was back out in the fields every lunch-break, kicking a ball and running around with the other kids. I thought about nothing else. Football was more than just a sport: it was a way of making friends at school without having to deal with the whole language thing. But it also got me noticed. Alan later revealed that he used to watch me play football during lunch. According to him, even at that age, I had incredible stamina. Wherever the ball was, that’s where I’d be too. I was relentless. The ball would be down one end of the pitch, one of the kids would hoof it all the way to the other end, and I’d chase it down as hard as I could. Then someone else would collect the ball and launch it back in the opposite direction. Without pausing for breath, I’d turn around and sprint back the way I’d come. I must have bombed up and down that pitch a hundred times a day.
Our school athletics season was divided into winter and summer. During the summer months and early autumn, when the weather was sunny, we did track and field sports. In the winter and spring, we switched to cross country. That first year we did a month or so of track work. Then Alan had us doing cross country races. It was on the cross country course, rather than the cinder track, where I first started to come into my own as a runner. I quickly realized that I was faster than everyone else. Not just in my class, but in the school. I won the races easily. However, being the fastest kid in school could be a problem. At the start of each race Alan would explain the route for us to follow. I remember one occasion early on at Feltham when Alan pointed out the course we’d be running.
‘Right, then. To make the course longer,’ Alan explained, pointing to the school field, ‘you’ll cut across to the middle of the field, race back around the outside, go down and roun
d some crooked ferns, and then head out onto that path you can see in the distance. That’s the course.’
All the kids nodded. I did too, although I didn’t have a clue what Alan had just said. ‘No problem,’ I thought. ‘I’ll just follow the other kids.’ The race began. I got off to a good start and swiftly broke away from the chasing pack. With no one to follow, I ran along what I thought was the route. A short distance further along, I glanced over my shoulder. Then I saw that every other runner had gone in completely the opposite direction.
I’d gone the wrong way.
From the corner of my eye I spotted Alan shouting at me, frantically gesturing for me to turn around and chase after the other kids. There were a few talented athletes at Feltham. One or two kids were bigger and physically more developed than me. I looked ahead, to the front of the pack. This much bigger kid was in the lead. I took a deep breath and charged back down the field, running as fast as my legs could carry me in a desperate attempt to catch up with the lead group. I managed to overtake most of the kids. But the lead runner kicked away from me as we drew near to the finish line. I wasn’t slow, I never lacked for speed, but back then my leg muscles weren’t strong enough to maintain my speed for a long stretch. I suffered a rare defeat. After that race, whenever I was running a course for the first time, I’d constantly look back across my shoulder to see where all the other runners were, just in case I ended up taking a wrong turn. No more playing catch-up.
Without a doubt, PE was my favourite lesson. It still lost out to football, but I enjoyed running in a competitive environment. Sport was my chance to shine. My English ability was never really an issue, even if I occasionally misunderstood some of Alan’s instructions. On the track, on the grass, all that truly mattered was how I performed. This was my chance to get involved. It made me feel that I was part of school life. I won almost every event at the annual school sports day.